Camping at Yosemite I once stupidly left my daypack outside the tent (I thought it was empty). I heard some squawking that night, but it settled down, and I ignored it. Next morning I found the pack on the ground with muddy raccoon paw prints all over it, and every single zipper unzipped. There was also a granola bar wrapper nearby. Mea culpa.
They’re all over our neighborhood. Drove my dog with the strong hunting instincts crazy. I have found memories of him running around sticking his nose down all the burrows while the ground squirrels had already made it across the street via their undergroung tunnels.
The only marmots I’ve seen were on a hike to an Alaskan glacier. They appeared no more “cute” than a typical groundhog. None showed any interest in me or other humans.
In July of 2025, a 30-year-old English dude tried and tried and finally succeeded to throw a package containing drugs and a cell phone into a prison. His attempts, of course, were caught on video, which was just recently released. He received a sentence of over 3 years for his efforts.
Well - for some flavors of "camping’. I used to hike backcountry trails for 5 days and up many times. So towing a camping trailer is arguably not “camping”, I get it.
Way back in the old days, my scout troop went to a park in Utah. We set up camp and went for a day hike. When we got back my tentmate found a hole in the tent and his pack, and a can of mixed nuts he had in it as a snack was chewed into and emptied. Some squirrel or other critter got a snack.
I’ve thankfully never gotten my food broken into by small animals. But one time we stayed in a walk-in cabin on the Blue Ridge and when we walked back to our car, the license plate was bent and there were obvious bear prints on the car. That was almost scarier than actually seeing a bear, because it means that, even though I’ve never seen a bear when randomly looking into the woods, that particular bear has seen people and has seen them enough to know that they do things with their hands to cars to get them to open. So in bear country it’s difficult to know if I’m being stealthily watched.
One of the ranger stations in the Sierra Nevada (near Lake Edison) had polaroids on their bulletin board of cars that bears had broken into. In most cases, the doors and side panels were essentially peeled back. They didn’t bother trying to break the windows. It was very dramatic to see a bunch of pictures at once.
It’s easy to see how quickly black bears become “habituated” to humans over time. Ordinarily they will run at away at full tilt at just the sight of people. Eventually they learn, at least in the parks, that at most people might yell at them or maybe bang some pots and pans or something.